


Until The Real Thing Comes Along

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: The Very Thought Of You [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Angst, Armitage is British Aristocracy, Armitage was A Fighter Pilot, Blow Jobs, Idiots in Love, Insecurity, Jealousy, Making-Up Sex, Masturbation, Period Typical Attitudes, Porn, Relationship Problems, Ren in Lingerie, Ren was his Manservant, Secret Relationship, Smut, mentions of injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-04
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:22:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22557823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Lord Hux and his ex-butler, Ren, have been on-off lovers for as long as they've known each other. The two of them are now trying to live together in post-WW2 London."I'd lie for youI'd sigh for youI'd tear the stars down from the sky for youIf that isn't love, it will have to doUntil the real thing comes along."-Billie Holiday.Thanks so much if you read this!
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Series: The Very Thought Of You [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623457
Comments: 67
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

Hux and Ren have been on unspeaking terms before. 

Eras of indifference, or insecurity. 

Then, those unutterably dark ages of Hux’s enlistment, his marriage, when they did not meet as friends but fucked anyway, tongues untied only to spur, and not to sweeten. 

But all that was _before_. Before their tiny flat in London, in which it's hard to hide anything, even words.

“Boiler’s on the bloody blink again,” Hux has to call out, because he’s not a complete bounder. 

He surfaces from his Saturday soak sooner than he would have liked, dripping dignity all over the floor. 

Ren comes and slouches in the doorway, not staring at Hux's chest, his clean cock, his pretty ankles. 

“Best get in then,” Hux surrenders his spot, passing by too close, scarlet-scarred and soft-haired and smelling of soap.

Their disagreement has made every room smaller, and sharper-sided.

And so Ren washes alone, while the second-hand water still holds its heat. 

Later, Ren mutters Hux out of his way, for the third time. He cannot push, because pushing would mean weight, and momentum, and Ren aches badly enough for that as it is. 

“Can I please get to the cupboard?” Ren is stretched awkwardly, avoiding Hux's elbows. He stares, dumbly, starving, at the perfectly ordinary slant of Hux's neck. His shoulders. He could unbutton his trousers and have Hux where he stands, rough and quick, with his teeth grinding against muscle as he comes.

“Of course.”

There has been no Billie, beloved, broken, for Hux to hum along to, as he rolls up his sleeves to scrub. 

No cheerful swearing, as Hux tries to smoke and sluice simultaneously, chinking what’s left of their absurd Royal Crown Derby tea set against the hard Belfast edge of their ceramic sink. 

The knock at the door makes them both wince.

“You might as well answer it, seeing as it won't be for me,” Hux says, throttling the dishcloth. “Seeing as it’s _her_.”

And Ren stops reaching for Hux’s hips, and does exactly as he’s told.

There’s still some black snow in the shadow of the front steps. The railings need repainting.

Rose folds her shawl tighter across her café uniform and looks left, at the window-box. The green beak of some inherited spring-flower is cracking the shell of soil. Hux has spoken of poppies for Easter, once he gets the allotment sorted out.

“You can say no, you know,” Rose apologises, even as her crooked cap pleads with Ren to put on his coat and follow her out across the square and around the corner. 

She's too nice to run a business. Giving jobs to people who inevitably let her down. Or decide they don't like working for foreigners.

She smells of sweat or vinegar. 

The flat holds its breath behind Ren’s back. 

“I don’t mind helping,” he shrugs, and takes the spare key down from the hook.

It’s late before Ren returns home. Hux has left no lamps lit, save where he is, fortressed by hurt feelings on the sitting room settee, and has forgotten his pyjamas, so Ren wraps himself in them, against the chill.

He punches his half-measure of pillows. Spreads them about, gathers them back in. 

The skylight eventually clouds over with the soft, sour mist that comes up from the river, and then, some hours on again, with another wounded January dawn.


	2. Chapter 2

Hux has stopped returning the blanket each morning, and reclaiming it each evening, and the permanency of this is as startling and unwelcome as the cold morning splashes they are reduced to. 

It’s also Wednesday before Ren notices. 

He sits in Hux’s bivouacked armchair, damp-chested, enfolding himself in these unexpected evidences. He is slow; slow and sore from the friendly slavery Rose has brought into his life, and from the angry absences which now fill the flat. They are not the right kinds of ache. His body feels empty and unclaimed.

He picks up Hux’s thin case of cigars. His comb. Hux has even got the table lamp going again, and Ren plays with the button. Light dusts like ash across Hux’s American comic books, sprawling in sin with Hux’s collections of Ovid and Catullus. There is morphine, and there are apple-cores. 

Hux is turning estrangement into encampment, some kind of boyish adventure. 

Resentment drives Ren’s hand between his legs. 

He wouldn’t usually bother, but he knows that Hux would. That Hux probably _has_. 

He can see it now, Hux fucking himself, right there, wet and red with sex, grunting and jutting with it, right there in the prim parlour, while Ren works all hours at the café, serving up halfpenny buns.

The morning winks, suddenly, licking a stripe up the centre of the room. 

Apparently, they have new, smartly swagged-back curtains to replace the old. 

Ren sticks his chin out and thumbs his waking prick. It is Hux’s hand on him, for all intents and purposes, because he needs the tease of it, the way Hux delicately dismantles Ren’s resistance to release. 

It is, possibly, the only area of Hux’s entire life where he shows any patience. 

The mess runs down; Ren rubs it back up. He splays his thighs but is hobbled by the stupid armchair. 

It is stupidly cramped. It is stupidly _Hux_ , this acceptance of discomfort as part of desire, this making do with denial, because he doesn’t deserve the thing itself. 

It’s never been easy, not giving Hux what he wants, because sometimes Hux prefers it that way.

But this time, Armitage has not even _asked_.

Ren’s tangled touches separate out into clear strokes. Once, twice, then he hooks his knee up onto the arm of the chair and loses count. 

There’s a lot to be said for giving in. Allowing himself to be _kept_ , if this is what the row is all about, allowing himself to be available, always, waiting and willing and spread out in silk, for whenever his lordship cares to come home and have him. 

To be a luxury, as well as a secret. 

Ren forms a fist, narrow and white-knuckled, and he forces himself up into it, over and over, flooding his fingers. 

Only it’s Armitage he’s coming in, for all intents and purposes. 

Because Armitage is all that Ren has _ever_ wanted, even if the reverse may not be true for much longer.

He tries to breathe again. Starts to cry. Stops. A tune starts up somewhere, four pure notes to shame the thudding of his sated heart. 

He takes off one of his socks, to wearily wipe himself with. The carillon sounds again, as Ren picks up a pear, which blushes on his behalf; he hasn’t set aside the time to see Armitage's allotment.

And he actually likes the new curtains; they’re blue-black instead of blackout-black, the jackdaw-black that Armitage is so fond of, that he swears he sees in Ren’s hair when he runs his fingertips through it and _pulls_.

He likes that Armitage has been pecking and pottering since they alighted in the city; a mated pair. 

Ren has always dreamed about Lord Hux in his fancy suits. Had nightmares about him in his uniform. 

Now he has something better to imagine; Armitage, _nesting_ , in his rolled-up shirtsleeves and old trousers, humming along to the gramophone as he scratches his stubble and pulls at their wormy wiring, having a crack at _fixing the bloody doorbell_.

“Oh no.” 

The bloody doorbell is fixed.

The third time of ringing is the charm. The Westminster Quarters fade away.

And Ren falls over some decorator’s catalogues in his hurry to go and let the plumber in.


	3. Chapter 3

Eventually, the last customers clear out; girls from the factory on payday, smudged and triumphant.

They’ve made Ren fetch matches, bring extra milk and rescue umpteen dropped napkins. 

“Well, you can’t blame them.” Lyn looks at Ren steadily, over the trayful of dirty, carmine-kissed tea-cups. 

Ren helps her into her coat, carefully; her dead son’s medals jangle on her blouse.

“But I’ll wait on their table next week, dear,” she pats his arm. “Spare your blushes.”

“Whatever does Mrs Holdo mean?” Rose smiles, uncertainly, from the back room.

Ren shrugs. 

Everyone else leaves. Rose keeps miscounting his wages. He doesn’t like that he doesn’t mind waiting; at least it’s noisy outside the cafe. The front windows give out onto the park and the crossroads. 

It’s late, but the city is like a child that has forgotten its bedtime, leaving lights on and dancing about and throwing tantrums until sleep will finally fell it for a few, reluctant hours. 

The flat is too empty.

Ren pulls the blinds down, one after the other. 

A train slows at the station behind the row of shops, the metal screaming.

Ren wonders if Armitage is on that one, at least, gathering up his newspaper, folded over to the completed crossword page. Being gallant to any women or children he comes across. Chaffing and tipping the porters. 

He was only supposed to have gone up to the Hall for one night. To sign paperwork. But that was three days ago and counting. 

“Will he always be a cripple, then? Your friend?”

Ren frowns into the bucket, and Rose reddens. 

“I only meant…I think it’s ever so loyal, the way you stick by him.” She clicks off the lamp next to the cash register. “I imagine it must be quite lonely for you.”

The mop-water smells like mud and pine-needles. Ren has to lean on the broom-handle for a moment, aching, quite suddenly, for the briar-hidden hut he and Armitage used to go to, the place where they first undressed one another.

He’s never gotten over it. That first, hungry, _fearful_ touch of skin on skin. 

Rose is still speaking, her voice too bright, misunderstanding everything. 

Ren looks up slowly. She is wearing her new hat and a brooch of crystal cherries he’s never seen before. 

It’s hopeless. This terrible thing, love. 

Armitage Hux does not own him, has never tried to, but he has _earned him_ , over and over, ever since he first braved rejection and revulsion and took Ren’s face in his hands and kissed all of his hope right into him, so long ago.

There isn’t anything Ren can do about it. 

Except make sure it carries on being hopeless, and terrible. 

“I said, surely he wouldn’t stop you, though, if you wanted to go to the pictures one evening? Maybe tonight even? We could…” 

The sale of the Hall is steaming on. Soon, the little, hidden hut will no longer be theirs. 

But that doesn’t matter, because Ren realises now that he belongs wherever Armitage wants him to be. And that their flat isn’t enemy territory, but a place where peace can be fought for, and treaties made. 

“Rose, I’m sorry.” Ren says. And he is, although he’s not sure, yet, for what. “You’re right. I am needed at home.”


	4. Chapter 4

They have never used the breakfast nook before. 

That is to say, they have fucked on it, near it, against it, but this is the first time Hux has drawn up a chair and spread out anything other than himself or Ren across it.

“Here’s the list of things for auction, or storage,” he waves his cigarette at the uppermost inventory. “Underneath are the unfortunates….Things too broken to keep, or that just won’t fit into this world anywhere outside the Hall…” 

Hux stops writing, disguising his dismay at defining himself by smartly capping his Waterman. 

It rings in the air, the snap of poised silver. Lord Hux has, Ren thinks, such beautiful wrists. 

All the lights are on in the flat, but Ren doesn’t turn them off, in spite of the shillings. Because he is in love with Hux, with the bother of him, the smoke and the ash of him, and he doesn’t want them to have anywhere to hide anymore.

He takes off his coat. The café rises in their shabby little dinette, an unperfuming of bitter cocoa and fishcakes.

Hux grows more grey, more white, at the reminder of where Ren spends his days, of this thing he cannot seem to digest, and he swallows his whiskey down. “Have a look, would you, at some point? Make any amendments you see fit.” 

“It’s your property. It’s not for me to say…”

“I rather think that it is.” Hux rarely interrupts. “God knows it was you that kept me coming back to the old place. Otherwise I’d have well and truly written myself out of the will, one way or another.”

“Your father would never have…”

“Damn my father, Kylo. You ran the entire bloody show for years. It must mean more to you than it does to me, to see it sold like this?”

“Not really.” Ren smooths the wood. Hux took a splinter in his thigh last time Ren pressed into him, right there. He fussed about it like a child, and Ren laughed. “I stayed for you.” 

“Well now.” Hux scrapes at his eyes. Stirs the paperwork around. “I’ve chosen some of Mother’s things as keepsakes for Mrs Rey, just trifles, really…”

“Please. Armitage.”

Hux has to look up, then. Manners making the man, and all that rot.

“I want to kiss you. Can I?” 

Hux hesitates, and then something in his frown changes and so Ren walks around the side of the counter-top and steps over the briefcase and the bag and the boots that Hux must have just dropped there when he came home, and he puts his arms around Hux and finds his warm, closed mouth with his own. 

“I want you to touch me again.” Ren murmurs and shifts his grip; the angle is odd, desperate. He gets burnt on the forearm by Hux’s cigarette. Hux drops the damn thing into his glass and then they knock the glass over as Hux arches into him, tangling and tugging. “Even if you’re disappointed, or hurt. Please. I’m sorry. I can’t stand it when you don’t touch me.” 

“Oh, sweetheart. I’m the sorry one.” Hux slides around Ren, into his hair and his mouth, under his clothes. He is at once everything that is wet, and everything that is afire. “I’ve been such a bloody fool.”

Then, they’re on the floor. 

Hux unbuttons Ren’s stinking shirt and then his greasy trousers and he bends, panting, to bite at Ren’s belly. 

“Yes,” Ren tells the nearest chair-leg. 

The day’s sweat is underneath Hux’s tongue. Ren’s skin is pinched and creased, from where he ties the strings of the apron too tight and it is also raw from the rough, cheap material and the steam of the café kitchen. 

Hux tastes it all. 

He forces down Ren’s plain, damp underwear and gets the curve of Ren’s cock into his throat. 

At last. 

“Fuck, Ky,” he pulls off to curse, rucked about and flushed hot and hard himself. “So bloody huge for me.”

Ren can’t even make himself politely avoid Hux’s fingers, when they come; he must be dirty, he ought to be ashamed, but it’s what they both want. Hux rubbing himself clumsily on something, crouched over and with his middle finger so far into Ren’s arse that Ren doesn’t quite know which way to push. 

Hux chokes because he’s leaning sideways and Ren can feel that that Hux’s damaged knee is tensing out of all rhythm, but he can’t do much to help him because he’s hitting against the furniture himself, as he thrusts and pulls on Hux's hair until Hux cries out.

It may not be the kind of softly-lit love scene one sees shining down from the screen at the picture houses, but it is what they are. 

They kiss again.

“I missed you. What a bloody mess I’m making of all this.”

“Just please don’t leave me.”

“Sweetheart, no, never. Let me have it now, please. Yes, Ky. Show me.”

And Ren spills all over Hux’s chin and cheek. And they kiss again, sour and starving. 

“I shan’t lose you.” Hux tightens his hold on Ren’s jaw. “I simply can’t. I will change, I will do anything to keep you, my darling. Tell me what to do.”

They undress. Hux wipes them both off on a tea-towel. They stumble down the hallway and the bed is finally, finally, full of them.

“You want to…take care of me.” Ren stills their hands and Hux’s lovely, busy bruise of a mouth. “Like a…housewife.”

“Do I?” Hux mumbles, eyes slipping along Ren’s shoulders and waist and hips.

With that sorrow said, Ren slides closer, wanting to let Hux at him again, his prick like a hungry, wormy thing between them.

But Hux tilts his head and just slowly, idly strokes up and down Ren’s chest. Scowls, amused. 

“Do you think I have been angry with you for earning an honest wage?” He moves from one nipple to the other. “Darling, I could only be happy to see you as my…concubine, if that’s what _you_ wanted. I mean, I can’t imagine there is a man or woman alive that wouldn’t wish to have you like that, all prettied up and lying languidly about the place, playing records and drinking cocktails and just waiting around to be given a bloody good seeing-to…” 

Ren has to pinch him. 

Hux attempts solemnity. “Yes, well, quite. But day-dreams aside, I have absolutely no objection to you taking up any opportunity that you want.” He squints at the ring he put on Ren’s other hand. “Marriage is about affection and support, not permission, or presumption.”

Ren pushes Armitage onto his front. They both try to ease the angle with pillows and end up with too many.

But there's time, oh, all the time they need, now, for reacquaintance, the rediscovery of secret pleasures, for remembering how joyous a mechanism the body is when it is loved; how simple it is to get the best out of it, with proper handling. But then, soon, very soon, there is no time at all, and Hux is shaking around Ren’s tongue and Ren has to run, actually run, skidding on the waxed floorboards in his woollen socks to go fetch the jar of liniment from the side-table in the sitting-room.

He puts himself back where he belongs. Hux must have lost weight, because Ren manhandles him almost too easily, onto his cock, true and very deep, like Hux is the one who’s the slender young courtesan. 

“Fuck,” Ren says, examining the lead brackets on the skylight. 

“Fuck indeed,” Hux agrees. He bows his backbone, to move things along. “But only if I’m not presuming.”


	5. Chapter 5

“What is it then?”

Ren startles Hux awake, after the second time they finish fucking, because it’s an antidote to the poison that sometimes comes to him after the sweetness; that one day this will not happen, that one day he will not have Hux, that Hux will not open his eyes in Ren’s arms, that Hux will one day die and go away from him, and make every fight they have ever had a farce. 

“If you don’t mind me working?” 

“Ah.” Hux turns his face into the silk-leaved canopy of Ren’s lap, hiding in the short slip that Ren has put on. The dense jostle of songbirds at the hem feathers across Hux’s badly bitten shoulder, hand-woven grey and cream. 

Ren looks down at the shape of his own mouth, moist with salve, now, sticky and sore and treasured; treating the wounds he makes on Hux is almost as intimately pleasurable as putting them on him to begin with. 

It isn’t something he indulges Hux in often; such sharp kisses. But this time he wanted Hux’s blood in him, as well as everything else. 

There is a pause into which Billie pours out her hopeful pain. Ren bought the record with his wages. Hux has played it over and over, cleaning his fingers carefully before each turn. 

“Fact of the matter is…I’m jealous.” They are both surprised when the word hisses against Ren’s bare hip. But there it is. 

Ren would like to say that after a while it loses its sting, its potent power to madden and paralyze. But that wouldn’t be true. 

“Rose is a nice girl,” he states, slowly. 

“Yes, she’d make quite the catch.” The admission is softened by Hux being beneath Ren’s skirts, but it still sounds cutting. “And, quite honestly, I’m fairly close to hating her.” 

Hux kisses Ren’s cock. 

Neither has a hope of getting hard, surely, but that’s not why Hux does it. 

By Ren’s reckoning, they’ve been together, by all measures that count, war and wife notwithstanding, for ten years.

“You’ve never been that way before.” Ren probably should be offended by that, but what’s the point?

“Never thought I had a real chance with you, I suppose. Not a _real_ chance at a _real_ life with you.”

It’s like biting Hux all over again; tasting the raw meat of him, the blood in his voice. 

“Truth to tell, Ky, I wasn’t even sure half the time that you even liked me.”

Ren uncovers Hux. It isn’t difficult; Ren’s slip barely covers his own body. They stare at one another.

“Until I came here to live with you.”

“Yes, my darling.” Hux flushes, but cages Ren’s gaze and keeps it captive. “I’ve just about got it through my thick head that I might actually have something worth losing.”

“You should know by now that I’m yours.” Ren accuses, and pushes on a dawning bruise. A thumb-mark, to be exact. These are their vows, their contracts, because there are no others to be had. “Don’t ever hide from me again, Armitage. We do enough of that in front of other people.”

Hux pulls Ren down then, fingers indelicate, easing up an embroidered edge. 

It shouldn’t be like this, Ren tells himself helplessly, not after ten years. 

“I promise, sweetheart,” Hux murmurs, sweet as song. 

The clouds and imprisoning tree-canopies flutter and fall. 

And, right there in their tiny London flat, the minivets take flight.


	6. Chapter 6

Tico’s Café starts servicing the evening crowd. They are lost children all, who still cannot face their bedtime, who still see monsters in the dark, and want to dance with them. 

Some of them are aristocracy, Hux’s people, and so, by marriage, Ren’s own. He can manage these suppers with one arm tied behind his back, although he does not say this to Hux, because of the _connotations_. 

The sunset goes down fighting, battering bloodily against the blinds. 

Ren waves Rose out of the double doors. 

“You don’t have to do these dreadful shifts,” Hux tells him, quietly, sitting down at his usual table. “I mean, just because I’m being so bloody…foolish and insecure and all the bloody rest of it.”

They can’t kiss, not there, not then, so they look at each other. 

Mrs Holdo pretends that it bothers her tombstoned heart, all this _love_.

She snaps Hux’s whiskey down in front of him. “When you’ve quite finished with our maître d', Squadron Leader, there’s paying customers he should be seeing to.” 

She pats his arm, severely. 

Before she takes his coat away, he slips the envelope out from his pocket. Covers it with his cigarette case. By the worry lines creased into the paper, Ren assumes it’s another letter from Frances. More of her elegant extortion. 

Ren shrugs, although it doesn’t shift the guilt any. He sets a match to the table lantern. “I’m not doing it for you, Armitage.”

The candlelight is alchemic; Ren might be honeymooning in Rome, not hungering for his almost-husband in a greasy London café. 

Hux nods down at his glinting knife, so innocently unseeing of the lie, so easily accepting of the snub.

It’s heart-breaking. 

Horrifying.

And Ren would recant, would confess that in truth _everything_ he does is for Hux, but he cannot speak, because Hux is beyond beautiful, in the old, golden light.

Honeyed, holy, simple in his complications, baroque, with the dear bones of his face naked in the near-darkness, Ren thinks that if he deserves Hux at all, his courage and his courage and his courage, then surely it is only by virtue of having waited for him, all these discordant years. 

“Mrs Holdo feels better if I’m here, now that we do more than tea and lemonade.” Ren shakes his hand, having burnt his fingers upon the flame. “Apparently, I’m _intimidating_.”

Hux looks up at that, amused, but Ren straightens his shoulders, strong and serious and workmanlike, with his collar undone and his shirtsleeves bunched up above the muscle of his forearms. 

Hux wets his lips in a well-bred kind of way. 

Ren shifts his hips.

Hux gawks a little. 

“I’ll show you how tough I can be, later, if you’d like,” Ren adds, suddenly emboldened, after only a decade. “When I get you home.” 

Then he walks quickly into the kitchen, Hux’s wonderment a warm weight pressing at his tailbone. 

The orders are already backing up. 

London has survived, and wants to show it, and the café is crowded with its endless burlesque of beef-pie and best hats and beer, but Ren looks at it this way; he and Hux now have the afternoons together. 

There’s the allotment. Galleries to go to, now that the bombs have stopped. 

They’re considering painting the flat.

And Ren does what he has never done before, and dozes and dreams the mornings away. Waking, he waits for Hux to return from the Veteran’s Commission, from his lawyers, from packing up the Estate; he waits on their bed, lying, lazy and greased open, for the scrape of the key, the rising of blood. 

Naked, but just as often not naked; Hux has harvested fields of barleycorn silk from the forgotten sewing room at the Hall, nacreous acres of seashell, a skyful of cloud and drifting blossom.

And his tailor is discretion itself. 

Ren has things to wear now which neither of them can take to the launderette on Vintrade Street. 

Mrs Holdo comes to the serving counter. 

Ren blinks himself back to stirring the parsley sauce. 

“We’ve been favoured by the smart set tonight. Knightsbridge money, slumming it, by their manners.” She skewers her ridiculous waitress cap tighter to her head then picks up a corkscrew. “All very gentrified, I’m sure.” Ren realises she’s staring at him, tapping her crucifix with outraged knuckles, grim as God. “One of them just climbed onto your young man’s lap.”

Almost an hour blurs by, before Ren can take a plate of this and that out to Hux. 

It’s hot, between the tables. Smoggy with furs, and perfume, and a mirthless, determined joy. 

The Duke of Dameron is bent, rearing, against Hux’s body, like some gaudy heraldic beast, all bared teeth and jewelled claws, reminiscing to his entourage about Hux and he growing up together on their neighbouring ancestral lands. 

Their mothers are distant cousins. 

His curls bob and paw at Hux’s jawline. “And then I went off skiing with the Methuens and forgot to tell Tigger here where I’d put the damned salamander. Spawned right there in the fountain. You caught a hundred kinds of hell for that, remember, Tigger dear?” 

He pinches Hux on the thigh. It’s where the war bit Hux hardest, the place that will never heal, and Hux shoves the Duke off and hobbles to his feet, cursing.

“You fucking arse, Poe. You complete fucking _arse_.”

Hux goes pale with the throb of it, and his arm shakes as he reaches for his cane. Then his whiskey. He grips at the misbehaving muscle. 

Ren dare not go forward, because if he does there will be violence done. 

And oh, but the Duke is handsome, even when dismayed and de-throned. He brushes coolly at his trouser seam. “Only for you, Tiggs, to be sure, although you never ask for it.” 

Some of the girls giggle, some grumble about going on elsewhere. 

“Honestly, Tigger, not being a wounded war hero myself, I simply forgot that such fondling was off the menu…”

“Just shut up and give me a bloody minute, will you?”

Someone spills something. 

The Duke steps right up behind Hux. Then closer still. “You’ve always brought out the worst in me, Tigger. It’s those terribly sinful eyes of yours.” He isn’t smiling now. Not at all. “I tried, you know, for such a long time, to get you to share their secret with me.”  
There’s something else there, in his voice, in the way he watches Hux fumble to light a cigarette, that is a world away from _insouciance_. It’s something that Ren, watching them both, recognises as plain and simple longing. “But I’m afraid you thought me insincere.” 

“Forget it. Just go back to your bloody clowning and forget it, Poe, old boy.” Hux glances around. Ghosts up a grin, awkward, recovering. “You’d put Scheherazade to shame, with your bloody fairy-tales.” 

And then he sees Ren.

“Speaking of fairies,” the Duke murmurs. He sits back down and blankets himself with a companion. “Lord,” he shouts, for the entertainment of the room. “How I loathe happy endings.” 

Ren puts down the plate of appetisers. It’s a pity; Hux eats so poorly that Ren would place each sweetmeat properly upon his tongue, if he could. 

He wants to hold Hux. To pull him close. But he can’t. Not there, not then.

“They tuned your piano. You promised me Irvin Berlin tonight, remember? Do you want to see?”

They go towards the back of the café, but then Ren draws Hux on, past the sturdy upright Steinway that Hux had shipped down from the Hall, past the grime-curtained alley windows and the into the cramped stock room. 

He turns around and shuts the door and goes to his knees before Hux can apologise for the many things that are not his fault.

“You’re upset.” Ren puts his hands to Hux’s belt. The leather is weary, burred soft at the edges. Ren thinks it would not be so very wrong, sometime, to bind Hux’s hands with it, as he takes him, bent over the back of their settee. 

God knows Hux has hinted around it enough. 

“Armitage, you must know that I would do anything to make you happy.” 

The buckle falls heavily to one side. 

“It’s this bloody world, Ky.” Hux laughs it out, but he’s shivering too. He doesn’t feign resistance, doesn’t stop Ren as he undoes his buttons amongst the flour and flagons of vinegar. “Frances is hell-bent on taking half the Hall, else she’ll drag us through the muck of the daily newspapers.”

Ren inhales; soap, starch and sweat. 

“You want to fight her.”

“It’s not the money. And I know I behaved abominably, marrying her, when all I wanted was you.” Hux leans against the shelving. Lets Ren get his cock out. “I just won’t have you…trampled on. Like so much dirt. She can do what she likes with me. But not with you, my darling.”

Ren doesn’t care about that, but Hux does, so Ren does.

“Then we fight,” he says, and takes Hux into his mouth. 

The comfort is for himself. There are flavours that flood out of Hux. There are sounds that he makes. These are the things that Ren needs. 

All of the time.

Hux touches Ren’s throat. His cane clatters onto the floor. “Jesus God, Ky.” 

Ren is ruthless in his adoration. He stops thinking about barren dukedoms and the unhealed severances of divorce, about the peas in the kitchen that need shelling. 

About the country that Hux nearly died for, yet would still deny him the dignity of choice and of companionship. 

“Damn them all, sweetheart.” Hux is close, crying with anger and fatigue and desire. “All I give a damn about is you.”

Ren finds Hux’s fist and unfurls it at the place where they fit together. Hux whines and strokes the spit-wet stretch of Ren’s lips around his prick, the sublime mess that only they make together, the entrance to Ren’s body that he is filling with himself, one in the other.

Hux braces. “Ky. That’s bloody perfect, but could you..?” Ren nods, after a fashion, and goes harder at it, scraping and using Hux roughly. He grips a hip, meaning to bruise, as Hux tenses. He swallows as Hux comes. 

And if there’s dust on Ren’s trousers, if his mouth is sore and his hair wrecked, then to hell with it all anyhow. 

“Give me your handkerchief, will you? Lord alone knows where mine is.”

“In your linen drawer, Armitage.”

Ren tidies Hux up.

They go back out into the corridor. 

Hux wipes at his cheekbones. Ren’s chin. 

And he shouldn’t do it, but Hux leans up and kisses Ren right there by the alcove, quickly and firmly. 

Mrs Holdo steps out in front of them. They step apart, but she forgives them with an impatient gesture.

“Kylo, dear,” she says, and they know then that something is badly wrong. “The telephone rang.” 

She wraps her cardigan around her elbows. It has a pattern of poppies at the lapel, in scraps of mismatched red wool. Her son’s medals are pinned to her breast. 

“I’m sorry, but it was the…hospital where your mother lives. They said could you come as soon as possible. I’m sorry.”

Hux takes the piece of paper she’s holding out, because Ren can’t.

As if a message like that can be forgotten, or misremembered. 

“Ky. They’re saying it’s a seizure of some sort.”

“Go.” She nods from Ren to Hux and puts together their things. “I’ll get Mr Pryde from next door to help me do the chucking out. He’s more frightening than you anyhow.”

And they probably shouldn’t do it, not right there, but Ren needs him to, and so Hux turns and tucks his arm around Ren’s waist, and Ren holds his other hand, and they walk out the front way, like that. Together.


End file.
